An Alarming Commercial Crisis in Eighteenth‐century Angouleme: Sentiments in Economic History

Abstract

In the autumn of 1769, a sequence of complaints was filed in the criminal jurisdiction of the Senechaussee of Angouleme against several of the most prominent bankers of the town-'bankers or capitalists', as they called themselves-accusing them of having charged usurious rates of interest. The plaintiffs were led by a brandy merchant and former innkeeper, and by a forge master who was involved in naval contracts; the defendants included the first alderman of the municipal government and the official receiver of the taille. The Angouleme affair made its way through successive legal, administrative, and parliamentary procedures, in Paris, Limoges, Cognac, and Angouleme, over the course of the next seven years, and ended in the vindication of the capitalists. It is this affair-one of the epics of grinding litigiousness of the end of the Ancien Regime, a story of Balzacien enmity, beginning in the town which represents all the pettiness of provincial life in Les illusions perdues-that is the subject of the present article. The affair of the bankers of Angouleme became famous, outside France, and well into the next century, because it was the occasion for one of the greatest works of economic theory of the eighteenth century. This was Turgot's Memoire sur les prezts d'argent, which was written in 1770 in the form of a memorandum about the litigation to the Controller General of France. Turgot was at the time the Intendant of the Limousin, which then included Angouleme. His custom, in this as in other cases, was to write economic theory, sometimes of breathtaking abstraction, interspersed with descriptions of immediate economic, political, and legal problems. The first 12 sections of the Memoire are thus concerned with the Angouleme story, and the succeeding 29 with the theory of interest; he returns in the final 12 sections to the judges and capitalists of Angouleme. Extracts from the Memoire were first published, in 1780, in a study on the theology of usury, and it was immediately attacked, in, a second theological work, as contrary to religion and expressive of the 'useless, lewd and twisted' views which were characteristic of 'economic science' (a science which was described as already 'beginning to go a little out